Elif Safak

[Helen]

Elif Safak and Gwyneth Paltrow

It took me a while to realise it was not the same person!
And why did I think Safak was a old lady?

http://www.aref-adib.com/archives/000429.html

Would be great if Paltrow found out about Safak and even made a movie...

[Gavur]

Elif Shafak prosecuted for “insulting Turkishness” receives Freedom of Speech award

The Turkish Union of Publishers has handed the Freedom of Speck award to writer Elif Shafak, the author of “The Bastard of Istanbul”, which once caused prosecution against her. When speaking during the ceremony Ms. Shafak said this award is very important for her and fills her with strength.

Besides, the Turkish Union of Publishers has issued a report which rates 2006 as the most negative year as regards freedom of speech. In 2006-2007 legal proceeding were launched against 43 writers and 24 publishing houses, the report says, Turkish media reports.

Arizona University professor, renowned Turkish writer and Zaman columnist Elif Shafak stood trial under article 301 of the Turkish Criminal Code, which provides for imprisonment up to 3 years. The novel of the 35-year-old writer tells about the events in 1915 in the Ottoman Empire.

Charges against her were, however, dropped. The Beyoglu (Supreme) Court in Istanbul decided that there was not sufficient evidence for the crime, so Shafak could not be prosecuted.

Provided by: PanARMENIAN.Net

http://www.hamovhotov.com/timeline/?p=766

[Joseph]

The Turkish Union of Publishers has handed the Freedom of Speck award to writer Elif Shafak, the author of “The Bastard of Istanbul”, which once caused prosecution against her. When speaking during the ceremony Ms. Shafak said this award is very important for her and fills her with strength.

Besides, the Turkish Union of Publishers has issued a report which rates 2006 as the most negative year as regards freedom of speech. In 2006-2007 legal proceeding were launched against 43 writers and 24 publishing houses, the report says, Turkish media reports.

Arizona University professor, renowned Turkish writer and Zaman columnist Elif Shafak stood trial under article 301 of the Turkish Criminal Code, which provides for imprisonment up to 3 years. The novel of the 35-year-old writer tells about the events in 1915 in the Ottoman Empire.

Charges against her were, however, dropped. The Beyoglu (Supreme) Court in Istanbul decided that there was not sufficient evidence for the crime, so Shafak could not be prosecuted.

Provided by: PanARMENIAN.Net
http://www.hamovhotov.com/timeline/?p=766

Brave woman...especially considering her mother was a Turkish diplomat.

[Joseph]

Sun 15 Jul 2007
Skeletons in the closet
LORRAINE ADAMS
THE BASTARD OF ISTANBUL

Elif Shafak
Viking, £16.99


THERE is a moral putrescence peculiar to the denial of genocide. Yet denial's practitioners are all around us. The Sudanese government calls the butchers of Darfur self-defence militias. The Iranian president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, dismisses the Holocaust as myth. In an official government report, the Turkish Historical Society describes the slaughter of more than a million Armenians between 1914 and 1918 as relocations with "some untoward incidents".

It seems obvious that the Turkish novelist Elif Shafak smells the rot in her homeland. Indeed, The Bastard Of Istanbul, her sixth novel and the second written in English, recently led to a suit by the right-wing attorney Kemal Kerincsiz, who declared that Shafak's Armenian characters were "insulting Turkishness" by referring to the "millions" of Armenians "massacred by Turkish butchers" who "then contentedly denied it all".

Earlier, Kerincsiz sued Turkey's best-known novelist, the Nobel Prize winner Orhan Pamuk, for telling a Swiss journalist that "30,000 Kurds and one million Armenians were killed in these lands, and nobody but me dares to talk about it".

Kerincsiz, who helps organise demonstrations to coincide with the court appearances of the writers he sues, opposes Turkey's bid for membership of the EU, and he acknowledges that these circus displays of his country's censorship laws aid his cause.

The critical consensus on Pamuk is undeniably strong, that on Shafak far less substantial. Most of her novels have not been reviewed in the West, and with the recent uproar she has become more discussed than read. In this new book, she has taken on a subject of deep moral consequence. But is the work worthy of its subject?

The Bastard Of Istanbul, set in the United States and Turkey, concerns two families - one Turkish, in Istanbul, and the other Armenian, divided between Tucson and San Francisco.

An ardent feminist, Shafak populates her novel with women. It's no surprise, then, that Mustafa, the Turkish man at the centre of the plot, is more of an enigma than a character. First seen in a Tucson supermarket as a college student, he falls for and soon marries a young American who has recently divorced her Armenian husband. Not only does his new wife enjoy offending her Armenian in-laws with a Turkish spouse, she also relishes the idea that her baby daughter will have a Turkish stepfather.

That child, Armanoush, endures shuttle parenting, moving between her mother in Arizona and her father and his relatives in San Francisco. Shafak sketches these Armenians flatly and superficially, as uniformly and fiercely anti-Turk - and as overprotectively fretful about beautiful and bookish Armanoush.

Instead of exploring her roots with her own survivor family, she makes contact with Armenian-Americans online, joining a chat group dedicated to intellectual issues, including combating Turkish denial of the massacres. At 21, Armanoush somewhat illogically decides to travel to Istanbul, where none of her Armenian relatives remain. She stays with her stepfather's Turkish family while keeping her mother and father ignorant of her whereabouts.

The family this young woman encounters is a confusing swirl of four generations of women that includes a great-grandmother suffering from Alzheimer's disease, a disapproving grandmother, her four daughters and one great-granddaughter. The eldest daughter is a self-styled Muslim mystic, another is a high-school teacher, and yet another a schizophrenic who lives in a fantasy world. The youngest runs a tattoo parlour and has an illegitimate daughter, the bastard of the novel's title.

Keeping all these women straight isn't crucial since they function chiefly as adornments of Shafak's magic realism, the inhabitants of a supernatural personal history. We learn, for example, that the men of the family for "generations after generations had died young and unexpectedly", a contrivance that explains why Mustafa is living in Tucson and has never returned to Istanbul to see his four sisters.

Armanoush's visit, which begins as an impulsive spurt of tourism, unexpectedly leads to a far darker explanation of her stepfather's exile. (Those who wish to read the novel and not have the ending spoiled should stop here.) She inadvertently helps reveal Mustafa's secret: that he raped his youngest sister, that this sister covered up for him and that her child is a product of incest.

It takes the mystic sister, with the help of an evil djinni, to bring about both her brother's death and his daughter's discovery of her origins.

Mustafa's crime is meant, presumably, to symbolise Turkey's long-denied history of genocide. But the fate of the Armenians is by no means obscure. In fact, scholars around the world have documented it with precision. Unlike the members of the Armenian diaspora, Mustafa's sister wilfully hides the circumstances of her rape - although it's difficult to believe that this miniskirted, high-heeled, radically irreverent woman would have engaged in such subterfuge.

When the novel's skeleton finally dances out of its flimsy closet, it's clear that although Shafak may be a writer of moral compunction, she has yet to become - in English, at any rate - a good novelist.

A valuable moment in the klieg light has been squandered, but Shafak, still in her 30s, has more than enough time to grow into a writer whose artistry matches her ambition. v

Elif Shafak appears at the Edinburgh International Book Festival, August 11, 2.30pm

Related topic

Book reviews

http://living.scotsman.com/topics.cfm?tid=1417

This article: http://living.scotsman.com/books.cfm?id=1101032007

Last updated: 15-Jul-07 01:57 BST

[Steph]

Joseph, this book is available in Tesco at £7.69 in hardback.
Try their online order service!